We stayed at Scone Airport for a very short time and I think in November, Bowen's airborne group was moved to an aerodrome in South Wales, St Athan. Now, this aerodrome was being built and it was a terrible winter. Everything froze up. It snowed and this aerodrome, again, no facilities. Bowen's group was set to work in an open hanger, and he does describe in his... in the book that he wrote about it sometime after the war that he remembered a future professor working in an overcoat and gloves, trying to solder some delicate equipment you see. It was that sort of life.

Anyhow, we had hardly arrived there when a German JU88 proceeded to drop a bomb on the runway. Well, fortunately, the bomb bounced and didn't explode, otherwise that might have been the end of us. Anyhow, at St Athan, we were told to proceed with utmost urgency in installing this 1.5 metre equipment in the night fighters, and that is in fact what we did. And also to install it in the aircraft, the Hudson aircraft, just arriving from America for Coastal Command to operate over the sea, but then Blackett appeared again, and he was then, appeared as a member of the Tizard Committee, and he saw what I was doing and he appeared at a very sad time because two young men that had come with me from Manchester called Ingleby and Beattie. Beattie was the son of the professor who lectured in electromagnetics. They were testing this equipment in a Hudson one weekend and it flew into a mountain and killed them both, so that was... then Blackett came to console me and he said, 'You know, people are not yet being killed' and it was one of the earliest tragedies that beset me. Anyhow, he saw what was going on and soon arranged that I should really be taken away from this installation and testing work and continue work again on the business of improving the system. And he arranged that I should be sent a young man, whom he called an Alpha Plus young man, and in the early years of 1940, this young man called Alan Hodgkin arrived to help me.

Now, Hodgkin, he was... I thought I'd have to teach him how to use a cathode ray tube. On the contrary. He already knew far more about those techniques than I did, because he was a physiologist from Cambridge who had been using all these new techniques. Well, Hodgkin became a great friend and later on he, he became... he won the Nobel Prize for his work and became president of the Royal Society and Master of Trinity, but that's far ahead. Anyhow, that was a great relief, to have a fellow spirit to work with and we built ourselves an enormous horn, not a paraboloid, but a metal horn and somehow we managed to find the... I think we used a very simple split anode magnetron and we certainly began to work on wavelengths as low as 50 cm, instead of the 1.5 metres.

Well, before we got very far on that, Bowen's group more or less disintegrated. A great dispute arose between the people who had been left in Dundee and Bowen on what was wrong with the equipment. There was not only the question of the ground returns, which obliterate everything greater than the height above which one was flying, but also the question of minimum range. How far one had to get to a German bomber in order to identify it as an enemy and not a friend. And the department at Dundee, it had been a great mistake to fund the move then. You'll find out from the history books how that mistake occurred, but in the spring of 1940, they were moved to the Dorset coast near Swanage, a place called Worth Matravers and we were ordered to join them.